


Leitmotif

by Leoporidae_Lagomorpha



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Depression, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, POV Second Person, Reincarnation, Suicide, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-07-10 09:53:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6978535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leoporidae_Lagomorpha/pseuds/Leoporidae_Lagomorpha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>A leitmotif or leitmotiv /ˌlaɪtmoʊˈtiːf/ is a "short, constantly recurring musical phrase" associated with a particular person, place, or idea.</em><br/> <br/>Every lifetime is different, every version of him encountered an unfamiliar facsimile, the only constant is your love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leitmotif

**Author's Note:**

  * For [transboydio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/transboydio/gifts).



> A cleaned up version of a chat that inspired me to write about the time travelling gay from the moon & gave birth to an unfinished kawoshin music store AU. Enjoy the early bday gift my rat dad!!

_A leitmotif or leitmotiv /ˌlaɪtmoʊˈtiːf/ is a "short, constantly recurring musical phrase" associated with a particular person, place, or idea._

* * *

 

You see him sometimes out of the corner of your eye; short dark hair on the pillow next to you, calloused fingertips, the shy curve of his smile and the tears perpetually threatening to spill from his eyes. You blink and the dream is over, but somehow the memory of his scent lingers. You smell him on the collar of your jacket, on your battered futon, between the pages of your book. He smells like earth after it rains, like no name soap and nervous sweat. You see him sometimes, as you first knew him, that first life, when you first found him and first came to love him. You'd found him so strange then, his downcast gaze and flushed cheeks, you realize now that he was embarrassed.

Countless lives have passed and still, you remember that first time, when you told him that you loved him, when you'd been young and foolish, you'd known nothing of the world and even less of what it meant to love.

 _He taught you that_.

You can still remember his smile. You have lived countless lives and you have died countless times and his smile has always been worth doing all of it one more time. You see him as an old man in a hospital bed, a round faced baby in a crib, a lone child on a school playground, you see him as you knew him, lithe and adolescent in his plugsuit still dripping with LCL, fumbling with the fit of his first formal suit, taking his high school entrance exam. You see him with his hands around your neck and tears in his eyes. Dying never gets any easier, but neither does watching him cry. You've lost count of how many times you've said _I love you_.

 _You can count on one hand the times he's said it back_.

You have yet to meet him in this life. You wonder if you will, you are twenty-four summers old and you still haven't met. You wonder what he's up to, if the others are with him, if he misses you as acutely as you miss him, if he bears the same startling emptiness in his chest and of course, if he is happy. You've memorized the feeling of his hand in yours down to the whorl of his fingerprints, the bones of his knuckles, his chewed down nails and the contrast of your skin on his, foolishly, you were pleased with how they looked intertwined. You wonder how much longer you will have to wait.

In some lives you grow up together, in others you meet as adolescents and in a few you grow old.

You always adjust to the ones that go badly the easiest, perhaps because some part of you still remembers the first time, when you first asked him to crush your existence in the palm of his hand. The bad ones don't scare you anymore, you have nothing to fear, not when there's just another life waiting for you when you wake up on the other side. Worlds where you're too late to intervene don't scare you like they used to. It's the ones that go right that scare you most of all. Those are the worlds where you fear, more than NERV, or SEELE, or the creeping shadow of Gendo Ikari's ambitions, your own selfishness.

One time you share an apartment together, divide chores and share meals. You're both younger than adults but older than you were when you first met. He cooks, you do the dishes, he plays classical every hour of the day, you go through books like paper towels. He likes to listen Beethoven's ninth symphony, you like him. You both study and work part-time and it is good and you are happy. (Or as close to happy as you get.)

You kiss him sometimes, he kisses back, that's new, you like that. You do more than kiss sometimes. You like that too.

You're lying on your bedroom floor, your head resting in his lap, his fingers are carding gently through your hair. In that instance, you think you understand the appeal of being a cat, you certainly wouldn't mind being a cat if you got to spend your days curled in his lap. You wonder what he'd look like with soft pointed ears protruding from his dark hair, no doubt adorable.

The curtains are pulled open and the room is bathed in silver moonlight. Despite the distant chirp of cicadas filtering through the open window there is something truly isolated about the space between your bedroom walls, a real sense of intimacy a private paradise of moon bathed walls and crumpled sheets. He looks beautiful when he smiles down at you.

You've lost count of how many times you've said _I love you_ and you can count on one hands the times he's said it aloud.

His lips are thin and a little dry when he leans in for a kiss.

You've lost count of how many times he's said _I love you_ without words.

It is only a week later, a week, a veritable blink of an eye in your time, that you come home to a message on the answering machine. There's been an accident, he was cycling home from school the way he always did on Tuesday afternoons because you always work late. Except it isn't Tuesday, it can't possibly be, because if it were Tuesday you'd have come home to the smell of cooking and he'd be home standing over the stove in the tiny kitchen of your shoebox apartment wearing the apron you got him as a gift when he first moved in, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a ladle in hand, brows screwed in concentration, completely absorbed in the symphony of sizzling pans and simmering pots. It can't be Tuesday because if it was he wouldn't have been hit by that drunk driver and broken five ribs that punctured his lungs and filled them with blood, if it were really Tuesday you wouldn't be collapsed in your empty apartment listening to a stranger on the answering machine telling you that your boyfriend is in critical condition, it cannot possibly be just another Tuesday, it has no right to be anything but the end of the world.

_It is a Tuesday when your world stops._

You can't remember how you got to the hospital, but you remember holding his hand. He doesn't make it. You hold his hand till his pulse stutters and finally stops. You hold his hand in yours till your fingers go as numb as your tear stained cheeks. The flat line of the heart monitor is seared on the back of your eyelids, in the front of your mind. You can taste his absence on your lips like the ghost of every kiss you shared and every kiss you never had. You rarely cry and when you do you do for him.

You hang yourself in the kitchen, because it reminds you too much of him, because of all the rooms in your low rent apartment it was his favourite. You don't touch his pills in the medicine cabinet or the razor by the sink and you don't dare to disrespect his favourite kitchen knife. So you use your favourite belt and the chair with the wobbly leg. You hum Beethoven's ninth. This is not the first time that you've committed suicide and it won't be the last, but this is the first time you didn't want to wake up afterwards.

You wake up in a coffin. You wish it were the last time. It is not.

You're twenty-four summers old and when he walks into your music store Beethoven's ninth is playing over the crackly speakers. He browses for a long time, flipping through the records by the back, classical and jazz, concertos and operas alike.

"I never knew there was a place like this," he says more to himself than anybody else.

"You like it?" You ask him and he startles in surprise.

"Yeah, it's great uh..."

"Kaworu Nagisa," you smile.

"N-nice to meet you, I'm Shinji, Shinji Ikari."

You fall in love for the thousandth time and maybe, just maybe, maybe you'll make him happy this time.

**Author's Note:**

> It's 2016 and i'm still listening to sad piano ballads and crying about kawoshin


End file.
